How communication and collaboration tech can help growing business feel 'small' again

Margi Murphy |
June 23, 2015

UK dairy gets back to its traditional family roots with Microsoft tech while Grant Thorton banks on Jive.

"It's helped customer service because more are involved in the discussion so they can feed back immediately while in conversation with a customer, and one of the 200 working in distribution can look into it back in the office", Graham says.

The firm also deploy sales teams to check shop shelves to see what promotions rivals are offering and to ensure they are providing competitive costing. With Yammer, this job has been opened up to every employee, who can simply send a message when they are in a shop and spot a rival's marketing campaign.

Graham said the tool was so simple his 97-year-old mother was active on it. "She's all over it."

Communication and collaboration tools in the enterprise

ComputerworldUK recently spoke to another firm: accountants Grant Thorton, about its rollout of Jive's employee social network tool that replaces the traditional intranet.

It rolled out its version of the software, called 'Jam', to its 4,500 UK employees, "90 percent which are active," UK CIO Greg Swift says.

It is currently integrating cloud-based HR tool Workday and its staff are using Jam to ease the deployment.

Grant Thorton invested in Jive as part of a refresh of its technology to attract an increasingly digital, younger workforce.

It operates a "boundary-less" workforce policy, and has a BYOD strategy to allow flexible working for all its employees.

Despite the success of the Jive rollout however, Swift said that being closer to employees and hearing their opinions could be difficult at times for the IT team.

Referring to feedback on the recent migration to Windows 10 the team undertook, he said: "some of the feedback is difficult to take, its constructive but it can be a little uncomfortable"